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I Feel It Coming Together

By Judith Warner October 15, 2009 9:10 pmOctober 15, 2009 9:10 pm

Editor’s Note: Readers of David Nicholls’s novel “One Day” should know that major events in the plot are revealed.

It was one of those moments that really should be meaningless. Julia and I were in the car, listening to the soundtrack of the new remake of the movie “Fame.” We were both singing along to the title track; I was grousing lightly to myself about the impudence of anyone’s even attempting to remake the 1980 Irene Cara song, when suddenly I heard Julia’s voice, stronger and more confident than mine: “I’m gonna live forever. I’m gonna learn how to fly. (High.)”

And one of those all-too-frequent choke-in-the-throat feelings came over me.

It is a strange thing to have a 12-year-old — that is to say, a child who is coming out of the family cocoon and starting to make a life for herself out in the world. Up to a point, of course. Julia isn’t yet going to college, or getting a job.

But on the day in question we were on our way home from shopping for clothes for a conference that she was going to attend in Washington. She was going to live in a dorm. Carry her own Advil. Dress in “office casual” clothes, the defining and finding of which had obsessed me, successfully channeling all my anxiety about her going away to be a mini-conventioneer among strangers. Until, of course, the clothes were found.

I kept coming back to one skirt, turning it in my hands and studying it. If I didn’t own it now, I was sure I had owned one very much like it in the past.

“I could wear this,” I said, holding it in front of me, and picturing it a size or three larger.

“But promise me you won’t,” she said, with desperate urgency.

It’s just that urgency that goes, in early middle age. “All that yearning and anguish and passion had been replaced by a steady pulse of pleasure and satisfaction and occasional irritation, and this seemed to be a happy exchange; if there had been times in her life when she had been more elated, there had never been a time when things had been more constant,” Emma Morley, one of the two narrators of the British writer David Nicholls’s recent novel, “One Day,” reflects, as life and love come together for her at age 38. “What is there to care so much about?” she continues, “… everything had evened out and settled down and life was lived against a general background of comfort, satisfaction and familiarity.”

This is a turning point in the book. Happiness — elusive for so long — has been achieved.
And then, three pages later, Emma dies.

This is the cruelty of middle age, I find: just when things have gotten good — really, really, consistently good — I have become aware that they will end.

“It’s the circle of life,” a friend said, semi-tearfully to me the other day, still recovering from her choke-in-the-throat experience of having received a note from her daughter’s fourth grade teachers warning that, soon enough, the precious 9-year-olds in their care would need to start to wear deodorant.

“Changes are coming.” She was still choking up over it. Puberty was on the horizon for her daughter; menopause for her.

We always say “circle,” but to be perfectly honest, I now see the passage of time more as a kind of bell curve. Years of ascension, soaring anticipation, followed by a plateau — which is not so bad, really — and then, no way to sugar coat this: a rather precipitous decline.

You are not supposed to think this, much less say it. A decline? Never!

Fifty is the new 30, after all; and 70 is the new 15, and 40 — well, the forties are just so fabulous that they can’t even be considered middle age. Even if they do happen to fall right smack in the middle of what, despite our best efforts, is still a limited human lifespan.

Susan Jacoby, the author of “The Age of American Unreason,” among other books, found herself, a year or so ago, attending a panel at the World Science Festival in New York City called “Ninety is the new Fifty,” and is now writing a book on the “delusion” she says we all have “that age is something that can be defied.” Her focus is on how the baby boom generation faces old age: “if we do everything right, we’re not going to get old or sad. It’s part of the belief that a positive attitude can fix everything and you’re not going to die.”

Yet the stirrings of mortality, and our fears of facing it, she acknowledges, can start much earlier. “The forties are a kind of deadline,” she told me.

My life, I’ve often told my girls, feels in these years as if I am constantly about to take a giant math test. Even so, I’d much rather be 44 than 14, as I was when “Fame” was first released. And 14 was already worlds better than 12. (“The seventh and eighth grades were for me, and for every single good and interesting person I’ve ever known, what the writers of the Bible meant when they used the words hell and the pit,” Anne Lamott wrote, in “Operating Instructions.” “Seventh and eighth grades were a place into which one descended… . One was no longer just some kid. One was suddenly a Diane Arbus character. It was springtime, for Hitler, and Germany.”)

There are trade-offs: intensity versus contentment, exaltation versus peace. And perhaps the best exchange of all: you trade in an idea of yourself for a reality that, if nothing else, can make you laugh.

Our family shared a ride to school and work the other day, and in the car we listened, of course, to “Fame.” I parked, and Max walked the girls to the front door of the school. Suddenly, spontaneously, he burst into song.

His shouts of “Fame!” were accompanied by sideways leaps and expansive arm gestures that I, from across the street, could recognize as disco-era choreography.

The girls scuttled off with record speed. The other children, and most of the parents, averted their eyes.

Yet one mother, tired-looking, with a baby in a stroller, kept turning back for more. One more glance, one more giggle. She walked off, laughing still, and shaking her head.

She may have made some kind of comment to her baby as she passed by me in the car; I couldn’t hear it. The music was turned up too loud.

Perhaps in a desperate attempt to stay young, I adopted (along with my crazy husband) an infant at the age of 45. She is now 2 1/2 and we are 47. We have a 13 and 11 year old, so we weren’t childless and desperate in that way. We just always wanted more children and when the opportunity presented itself to adopt a special needs child from foster care, we jumped on it. This has made all the difference in the world to how I feel. Despite the fact that people often think I am her grandmother and that riles me up, I have accepted that this is no longer “my time.” This is the time for me to send good citizens out into the world. I no longer want to achieve anything except to watch my three children develop into good people. I am a lawyer and, if I get a chance to litigate that once in a lifetime case as I have always wanted, that would just be icing on the cake.

It is remarkable how we are really crazy when it comes to age. I’m 54, still feeling feelings like from when I was much, much younger. I’m single, still wanting to meet “the one” that I want to marry and spend my life with. I’ve accomplished great things, but that next phase….I’m still sure it’s coming! I still live in anticipation. And I am athletic and extraordinarily active. that’s what life looks like at 54, so no, age doesn’t enter into it too much.

What lives we lead! And we all want to define our lives, as if we can be the sole author of them…… that’s what’s really so different. A refusl to accept a societal definition of what each age should mean….. that’s how we are changing and redefining aging.

The generation I live and move in (although with arthritis and cane and handicapped parking) is very much aware of facing and coping with old age – or late middle age, as we prefer to call it. We on Social Security and Medicare drug plans know the statistics for us and life expectancy, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to figure I’ll probably be dead in 10 years or so. Or not much longer after that.

Consequently, a number of my friends are choosing to affirmatively reach out to life. Yes, go fly for Christmas to see grandkids (and their parents, my children – how did I get to have three sons over 50 and getting AARP literature?-and the youngest, close behind.) Yes, go see the movie/read the book/get to an occasional theater for a stage production. Yes, take piano lessons and practice Bach, even though I stopped lessons before WWII.

And, for me, yes, continue to teach (and be thankful I get offered contracts) at both a university and a community college, with 61 current students writing research papers that need to be graded this weekend.

Judith, enjoy your daughter and, if you have them, Max and other children. But don’t think it’s all ending. You’ve got another 30 or 40 years to explore life! And it’s damn fun looking ahead, rather than omigod, it’s ending!

Jan Bone, Palatine IL, who received her 2nd master’s degree (in training & development, concentration in e-learning) 3 days after her 76th birthday

I never used to think of age very much until about a year ago, when I realized that in a year I’ll be 60. I have never lied about my age, always felt that I had still time to live. But in the last year I find myself counting the years that might be left to me and all that I didn’t do. My teenage daughter is a reminder of time’s passage–she is poised to go on in life, full of anticipation, ambition and hope. I am headed for the grave.

I find myself thinking of how to allocate my books, jewelery, and other belongings. When I think of buying something for the house, I know it would be probably the last time I’d buy that item. I don’t like this feeling, but I try not to dwell on it. If I didn’t, I’d go crazy, or at the least wallow in self-pity. So I carry on. And stay strong. That is the best we can do. What is inevitable is beyond our control.

Judith, really…the self-absorption is really over the top. It’s not about you or your daughter, it’s about us…together…trying to improve the quality of life for ourselves and others. I do not sense this in your piece today. I usually love this column, but the obsession with age and worse yet comparing oneself to whatever it is you are seeing or hearing on any given day is time lost…forever.

So true, everything that Ms. Warner mulls over here, with what poignancy …and how lucidly! I am reminded of the Kenneth Patchen painting which I encountered at around age 15, reproduced in the old philosophical magazine, Motive: “But What Shall We Do? GET READY TO DIE…”

I’m getting accustomed now to being a middle-aged man (having The End in sight, yet daily feeling like an unaccomplished, inchoate teen); my next birthday will be my 52nd.

Recently I adopted as my profile-photo in Facebook a head-shot of Stanley Kunitz, the poet who died having attained the grand, round age of 100, which I aspire to do also, vainly… (wry pun intended). In this particular shot of Kunitz he bears a striking resemblance to the wizened Star Wars character, Yoda — those who know Yoda and also are familiar with this particular late-life Kunitz head-shot will surely agree.

And I invoke the celebrated Yoda line, uttered, I believe, to a Luke Skywalker who is young, dumb and full of …vinegar: “When 900 years old you reach, look like me you will not.”

II am 62 and had similar conventional (forgive me) ideas about aging as you do when I was younger. Ah, the gentle acceptance of one’s limitations and destiny …the adjustment of goals to reality….the new feelings of peace as the years wear down one’s churning ambitions and we pass the torch.

Not so fast.

Far from settling, I am in a desperate race to reach those long-deferred dreams and goals before I hit the wall — whatever unpleasant material that wall consists of.

I had big dreams growing up, and a lot of promise, but I married an ambitious professional man and had children, and life did what life does; throw a lot of curves. I ended up, frankly, prostituting my writing talent to advertising in order to put food on the table and a roof over our heads.

Now that my kids are grown and I can finally work from home, I have been able to write and sell a screenplay and see it filmed (set for theatrical release next year), option several more scripts, now in development, and start publishing my short stories again. I also got an agent for the first time for my novel, finally underway. My forties a “deadline?” If I had accepted that, I would be a miserable soul indeed.

I am fully aware that I am jamming all of my big dreams into the last sliver of my cognitive lifespan, but for some of us, that’s the only choice we get. I did not deny my kids my time or force them to live in poverty or fob off my parenting on somebody else.
I was not smart or aggressive enough to get a marital settlement that would have supported my writing life. I didn’t remarry for whatever reasons, so I never had the option of working less.

I did spend precious years failing before I finally sold a script, but even then, I knew was finally doing what I was destined for, and that made even failure a more satisfying proposition.

I am denied the luxury of standing pat on what I have accomplished so far. I have accepted that my career might peak posthumously. Or it may already have. But I seize each day as an opportunity to start on the rest of my life. Far from declining, I have never been more successful than I am right now, and I feel quite sanguine about my professional future.

Thanks for the quotes from Anne Lamott quoting The Producers (both the book and the movie/musical are favorites).

I am not at all fond of aging, coming to me as it has with aches and pains and weight gain and dealing with our last adolescent in the house. I suppose it beats the alternative, as they say, and I am getting better at silencing the time-borne demons that want so badly to point out how relatively little I have accomplished in my 50+ years on the planet.

My family on both sides tends to longevity, and living reasonably intact until 90 or older is not out of the question. Will it be enough time to have learned to stop measuring out my days with teaspoons? Will it be enough time to overcome the two things keeping me from fame and fortune? (Which is to say, poverty and obscurity. And those, too, are very relative words. At this point, I’d trade the rest of my 15 minutes of fame—about 7.5 minutes left, I think—for some relief from hot flashes.)

Judith – Love your writing. It conveys and transports. Good work! I mostly agree with the insight coming through here. Particularly about the boomers bet to beat death. But there’s something missing. I don’t know if you have had any major diseases, but the fact that you are really facing mortality only now is because you are lucky.

My take is that mortality has always been there. You just didn’t have to ponder it earlier because of a life accident or random event. Prostate cancer, for example, in my case brought up the whole file. Surgery, cured, treated and 5 years later I waltzed in and asked my surgeon “when can I stop worrying”. He said stop now, 4 years disease free means you only have a 15-20 percent chance of recurrence.

I obsessed over that until I realized that life is at least 15-20 % dangerous. Which is why some don’t see 40 and others live forever.

Also, while most of the “first’s” are long behind us middle-booms (would that be thudders?), starting a new craft, career, art form, etc., can be hugely electric. Just like it was then but with more candlepower from the horizon of perspective. I started writing poetry, for example after being a commercial composer for 25 years.

I agree that the 40’s are a deadline decade. But, once navigated, many people report even happiness in later years once the “it ain’t forever” river is crossed and accepted.

In many ways I feel that the mid-thirties is the start of the happy plateau that you discuss – I know it was for me – though we are not all as settled as you are so not as willing to embrace the flattening of possibility! For me, I’ll try to keep the peak going a bit longer (looks like I’m about five or six years younger than you are.)

On a related note – I looked up the reviews of that book you wrote – it’s new, and looks like you gave away a major plot point! Not even published in the US yet. Perhaps you could select an equally poignant but older work of fiction to make your argument?

Bell curve!? I am 66 years old, very happily retired in Paris, living with my wife of 37 years in a relationship that just keeps getting better. We are psychically if not physically close to our two grown children.

While I definitely agree with the comments about the 7th and 8th grades, I take great exception of defining our life experience as a bell curve.

Inevitably their will be a descent, hopefully fairly short and painless, but not a symmetrical bell curve.

Nice column. I agree that life is not quite the circle we delude ourselves into believing. Our 11 year old son is now getting to the point where his physical abilities are approaching ours (we are in our Mid 40’s). I certainly feel that I am on the other side of the bell curve. I am a competitive runner and have had to deal with my own declining abilities. I kind of laugh when people ask me if the time I ran for a recent race was a “personal best”. I sometimes need to explain to them and say “look my best performances happened 15 years ago… performance (no matter how well you train) does not get better with age.” The media is so full of stories of 60-70 yr olds running marathons that many people actually think that we can improve with age. The fact is that if you’re running your best marathon at age 60 you were most likely an incredible slacker in your youth. After 40, the direction for the body only goes in one direction…down. If we get it right, our ever increasing “wisdom” (another delusion) will help us deal with our declining body. Even though my best performances are 10+ years removed, my “wisdom” reassures me that most 40 yr olds couldn’t do what I’m doing and for that I am truly grateful. At age 70 my “wisdom” will no doubt conjure up another rationalization but this is what allows us to go forward. I do not look forward to being 70 but I also do not fear it. With age will come limitations (mostly physical) but hopefully with age (via wisdom) our minds can become less limited and our lives perhaps more fulfilling. Herein lies our challenge.